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The net effect : romanticism, capitalism, and the internet
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ISBN: 0814741177 0814708749 9780814741177 9780814708743 9780814741153 0814741150 9780814741160 0814741169 Year: 2010 Publisher: New York : New York University Press,

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This book about America's romance with computer communication looks at the internet, not as harbinger of the future or the next big thing, but as an expression of the times. Streeter demonstrates that our ideas about what connected computers are for have been in constant flux since their invention. In the 1950's they were imagined as the means for fighting nuclear wars, in the 1960's as systems for bringing mathematical certainty to the messy complexity of social life, in the 1970's as countercultural playgrounds, in the 1980's as an icon for what's good about free markets, in the 1990's as a new frontier to be conquered and, by the late 1990's, as the transcendence of markets in an anarchist open source utopia. The Net Effect teases out how culture has influenced the construction of the internet and how the structure of the internet has played a role in cultures of social and political thought. It argues that the internet's real and imagined anarchic qualities are not a product of the technology alone, but of the historical peculiarities of how it emerged and was embraced. Finding several different traditions at work in the development of the internet—most uniquely, romanticism—Streeter demonstrates how the creation of technology is shot through with profoundly cultural forces—with the deep weight of the remembered past, and the pressures of shared passions made articulate.


Book
Metagaming : playing, competing, spectating, cheating, trading, making, and breaking videogames
Authors: ---
ISBN: 9781452954158 1452954151 0816687161 9780816687169 Year: 2017 Publisher: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press,

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"The greatest trick the videogame industry ever pulled was convincing the world that videogames were games rather than a medium for making metagames. Elegantly defined as "games about games," metagames implicate a diverse range of practices that stray outside the boundaries and bend the rules: from technical glitches and forbidden strategies to Renaissance painting, algorithmic trading, professional sports, and the War on Terror. In Metagaming, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux demonstrate how games always extend beyond the screen, and how modders, mappers, streamers, spectators, analysts, and artists are changing the way we play. Metagaming uncovers these alternative histories of play by exploring the strange experiences and unexpected effects that emerge in, on, around, and through videogames. Players puzzle through the problems of perspectival rendering in Portal, perform clandestine acts of electronic espionage in EVE Online, compete and commentate in Korean StarCraft, and speedrun The Legend of Zelda in record times (with or without the use of vision). Companies like Valve attempt to capture the metagame through international e-sports and online marketplaces while the corporate history of Super Mario Bros. is undermined by the endless levels of Infinite Mario, the frustrating pranks of Asshole Mario, and even Super Mario Clouds, a ROM hack exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. One of the only books to include original software alongside each chapter, Metagaming transforms videogames from packaged products into instruments, equipment, tools, and toys for intervening in the sensory and political economies of everyday life. And although videogames conflate the creativity, criticality, and craft of play with the act of consumption, we don't simply play videogames--we make metagames"--


Book
Live coding : a user's manual
Authors: --- --- --- ---
ISBN: 0262372622 0262372630 0262544814 9780262544818 Year: 2022 Publisher: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press,

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